Sure enough, the missing shirts were found. They had been mistakenly given to someone with the same last name. This is fairly standard stuff. But here is where the tale takes a turn. When Mark arrived to pick up his shirts, he discovered one of them was still missing.

"Where's the other one?" he asked.

"The guy who returned your shirts," the clerk replied, "is wearing that one."

Apparently, the man had on my friend's shirt when he walked into the shop and gave back the others. In awe of the man's brazen behavior, I neglected to ask how the clerk knew that the man was wearing my friend's shirt. Did the clerk remember the shirt? Did the man tell him he was wearing it?

People lose things all the time. They don't even have to be 12. Me, for example. I am a grown-up and I constantly lose stuff. Keys. Reading glasses. The way home from various parts of town.

I was, then, the perfectly wrong person to find my son's shirts. In our home, my wife is the finder of lost items. But she was out of town. So I did the only thing I could do. I blamed her. These shirts wouldn't be lost if she were here, I told myself.

Unfortunately, that didn't help find the shirts.

So I came up with a strategy: Do what my wife would do.

But I had no idea what she would do. If I did, I'd probably be able to find stuff on my own.

I considered sending her an e-mail, asking her what I might do. But I didn't want her to worry that things at home were falling apart without her. If he can't find the boy's shirts, that must mean he isn't doing laundry, and if he isn't doing laundry, what else aren't they doing? Are they even eating?

Having no recourse, I stepped up to the plate and handled it like a man. I decided to forget about the shirts.